ABSTRACT
Nothing better reveals Keats's defiant self-sufficiency and readiness for literary combat than his attitude before the publication of Endymion. Extract (a) shows that Leigh Hunt disliked Endymion (‘But who's afraid?’). The preface Keats intended to print, Extract (b), is ‘an undersong of disrespect to the Public’, which is ‘a thing I cannot help looking upon as an Enemy’; nevertheless, he is prepared to accept criticism, for ‘there must be conversation of some sort.’ By ‘a London drizzle or a scotch Mist’ he means ‘a damping reaction from the Quarterly or the Edinburgh Review.’ His modified preface ‘in a supple or subdued style’, Extract (d), forced on him by the alarm of his publishers and friends, is an awkward compromise between ingenuousness and deference which left him more vulnerable than the original one would have done. Taylor had a hand in the wording of it. Even in this approved form, Reynolds afterwards called it ‘a strange and rash preface’.
